Saturday, July 14, 2007

I am usually not a fan of trilogies, I like to be taken over by a book so completely that when I am finished, it lingers...I like that lingering feeling. I don't immediately want to go out and delve back into the next part. Incidently, Paul Auster is on his way to changing my mind. He's my featured author of the month! Check him out!

Auster gained renown for a series of three experimental detective stories published collectively as The New Youk Trilogy (1987). These books are not conventional detective stories organized around a mystery and a series of clues.

Rather, he uses the detective form to address existential issues and questions of identity, creating his own distinctively postmodern form in the process.

The search for identity and personal meaning has permeated Auster's later publications, many of which concentrate heavily on the role of coincidence and random events (The Music of Chance) or increasingly, the relationships between men and their peers and environment (The Book of Illusions, Leviathan). Auster's heroes often find themselves obliged to work as part of someone else's inscrutable and larger-than-life schemes.

Many of his texts are based on his own life experience:

"If all these books were put together in one volume, they would form the book of my life so far, a multifaceted picture of who I am."

Thursday, July 12, 2007

My 4th of July was spent with my very favorite people, my neices and nephews. My sister Audra's kids are Colby (7), Riley (8), Casey (3), and Alley (1.5), my brother David now has one daughter, the little tike getting all the love from her cousins, Anna (7 months). I remember when Riley was five and she came up to me point blank and said, "Um, Aunt D'Arce, I'd REALLY like a cousin." I couldn't believe how they can turn on you at five! Thank goodness my brother came to the rescue. Everyone now has a cousin, life is good, and when they start crying, I can give them back!

The amazing Potter family hosted a "Time Travel Party" for the 4th. Everyone was supposed to dress like someone they admired from the past. Rebecca in her beautiful sari straight from India was Mrs. Ghandi, Emily, with her dreads and destructive nature was Shiva, the god of distruction, and Daniel....well, I don't think he ever decided, at one point it was Sufjan's murderous clown and later it was the unromantic Bozo, personally, I think he could pass for an 80's skater at the end of Xanadu, or as the movie critic once said, "Xan-a-don't". I, at first, was the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir, because I always wanted a crazy, existentialist boyfriend (Sartre), but when no one knew who she was, and Emily found me a microphone, I became Barbra Walters, circa 1958...complete with beehive. Stephanie was a someone British, with a frown, I can't remember now, and Darrin is obviously Robin Hood (although fictional, we let it pass). The night wouldn't be complete without a rousing game of croquet.

I have been writing a new novel, this one takes place in modern day New York and is in no way semi-autobiographical (just like Ethan Hawke's new movie). However, I created such a charming character yesterday, he came out of no where, he is in training for the New York marathon, and I admit, I have a bit of a crush. In fact, most of my life's crushes have been from fictional characters rather than real men....I think it began with Atticus Finch, continued on with Mr. Darcy, and just got worse with Mike Flannigan.

Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.Jane Austen, EmmaEnglish novelist (1775 - 1817)